Observations: Alabama 96, Auburn 84

Call it effort. Call it execution. The result is still the same: Auburn spent the majority of a make-or-break rivalry game losing by double-digits.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Auburn saw a familiar winning formula Saturday night.

The victorious team overcame a lackluster 3-point shooting percentage by being the much better team in the paint.

It also had a sizable advantage on the boards, with a special emphasis on taking full advantage of a large number of offensive rebounds.

It could also survive the other team hitting shots by finishing possessions on the defensive glass and forcing empty trips with turnovers.

Unfortunately, Auburn wasn’t the team that did all that Saturday night. In fact, the Tigers haven’t done much of that over the last month or so.

Instead, it was rival Alabama that checked those boxes.

“Thought they beat us at our own game,” Auburn head coach Steven Pearl said after Alabama won 96-84 to complete the season sweep.

In the end, Alabama got the win it wanted — and the one Auburn needed.

While Alabama was locked into a double-bye for next week’s SEC Tournament and already had a strong NCAA Tournament seed sealed up, Auburn more than likely had to get an upset victory like this one to get back into the field.

Heading into the final day of January, Auburn was 14-7 and on a four-game winning streak that pushed its SEC record to a competitive 5-3. A fifth straight trip to March Madness, and the first one under the younger Pearl, looked likely after what had been a challenging start to his head coaching career.

But now, Auburn has lost eight of its last 10 games. It will go to an SEC Tournament that it won two years ago and made the semifinals of last year as the 13 seed, now having to play a Mississippi State team that it didn’t beat in the regular season. The Tigers would need to win three games in three days to make it back to Saturday.

While Auburn wasn’t expected to beat Alabama on Saturday in Coleman Coliseum, it might be more about the way that the 12-point loss went down than the result itself.

Auburn never led and was down by double-digits less than eight minutes into the game. It was down by 20 with 5:18 left in the first half. It outscored Alabama in the second half, but it never got closer than 12 points — and even that came in the final couple of minutes, when the home team was unloading its bench.

Was this a product of lackluster effort? That’s a question this writer posed to Pearl after the game, because Auburn didn’t look like the team that had more to play for Saturday during that lopsided first half.

“I don't think it was lacking,” Pearl said. “I just think we were just a little too casual… No, I think the effort was there, it was just the execution. And that's something that we’ve struggled with a little bit this year.

“And we gotta button that up, because it’s win or go home at this point.”

Whether you agree with Pearl’s assessment or not, the result is still the same: Auburn missed out on yet another real opportunity to greatly help its own cause.

Auburn is now just one game over .500 overall. The Tigers went from two games above that mark in SEC play in late January to four games under it by the end of the regular season. The 7-11 record matches the last two times they didn’t dance, and it will likely take a hot run and some help in Nashville to avoid joining those teams.

Even though Pearl laid out his case for why Auburn should still be in the mix for a bid against what is a historically weak-looking bubble, he acknowledged that the Tigers need more wins — plural — after barely getting any in the second half of SEC play.

“The urgency is that this might be your last game, if we don't find the urgency to win these moving forward,” Pearl said.

Perhaps the fact that urgency can even be questioned is the biggest problem of all.

Here are three big Observations from Auburn’s 12-point loss at Alabama, along with the Rotation Charts, Two Stats That Stood Out and the Quote of the Night.

(Steven Leonard/Auburn Tigers)

Auburn got “punked” and “pushed around” down low again